Evangelion - Apex
by Tome Zero
Summary: Six years after the End, Tokyo thought that a thousand years of peace was at hand...


Evangelion: Apex  
By: Tome Zero  
Chapter One  
The Kyushu Horror 

Above them, the sky was blue, two light, cirrus clouds wafted gently, innocently, hurting nobody. These two clouds gazed down at the Kyushu countryside. Beneath them was a bustle of activity, as trucks and jeeps and tanks hurriedly skittered about, cutting disgusting brown trails in the soft, muddy ground underneath the rolling emerald hills.  
            In the distance, lost against the horizon, two forms marched steadily, slowly, inexorably toward the jumble of tanks and trucks. It had been six years since the Mainland Defense Force had been mustered. Six years since the boys at NERV had taken down the last of the Angels, those wicked, alien beasts who cut a swath across the Japanese cityscape a half a decade ago.  
            These creatures, these... things, were new. A forward air controller buzzed about them in his tiny, tinny, prop plane. He was sending images of these new machines, these new demons, back to Ground Command.   
            "Colonel, I'm not believing what I'm seeing here." The pilot of the light plane croaked through his headset.  
            "What are you seeing, Sam?" A familiar voice shot back.  
            "You getting the feed?" Sam asked? Back at the command tent, a small monitor flicked on. A shaky, blurry streak lit up the display.  
            "Sam, zoom out a bit and pan around." Colonel Katsuragi asked the airman. The image on the screen began to shrink, revealing long, thin, limber limbs. "My God..." The Colonel gasped.

Sam's plane buzzed around the two goliaths, slowly circling them at about a mile out. He was in no hurry to get shot down by these beasts. If he was lucky, they hadn't even detected him yet. Heh, he was only fooling himself. He knew that those monsters had a radar lock on him by the time he was fifteen feet off the ground. The fact that they've let him live this long chattered volumes into his mind's ear. They want to be seen, why else would they have just stepped out of the sea and onto the Kyushu shore? Right out of the Sea of Japan, right into plain sight. Heading straight toward the bombed-out remnants of Tokyo...  
            "Sam, come in." The Colonel's voice cracked over the radio. "I want you to pull back, we're sending in an airstrike." Sam breathed a sigh of relief as he stamped his foot down on the rudder pedal. The single-seat light plane crooked and weaved away from the two marching machinations of malcontent and murderous mayhem.         

--  
The Colonel put her slender hand up against her brow, shielding her eyes from the setting sun. The two machines, Angels, whatever they were, were silhouetted against the sun. The two of them looked like ink stains on the face of her beloved Rising Sun. Katsuragi placed her hand on the silver crucifix around her neck. It clinked lightly against her dog tags. This sound, soothing to her ears. Made her think about nicer times, calmer times. It made her wish that Shinji and Rei were still around to watch her back. When they disappeared off in the Nevada desert three years ago, Mitsato didn't know what to think, what to feel. Langley was torn up, yes. The three of them were thick as thieves, they were. But that was back, in a day long ago, a recollection shrouded in mist and fond memories... 

Sam saw two specks on the horizon, tiny they started out, but grew to immense gray blurs in a matter of seconds. The fighter jets screamed past Sam's plane, so close that he could almost smell the afterburnt exhaust. About two seconds later, he heard the staccato burst of cluster bomblets bursting on the ground. Then, a clang, the sound of a marble falling into the bottom of a steel can. Then... nothing...

--  
The fighter jets screamed over the command tent, they couldn't have been more than eighty feet off the ground. They must have been moving near mach speeds. The canvas of the tent flapped and rustled for a moment after the jets passed overhead, loose papers and unsecured charts flapped around wildly, as if the inside of the command tent had instantaneously become one of those Tornado O' Yen chambers that are featured in the batshit insane television shows that ran on the television, back when such vapid, meaningless things still mattered, back before Second Impact, back before the Angels, back before Shinji and Rei disappeared out in the barren, lifeless mountains of that accursed desert territory...  
            Mitsato watched as the fighters shrunk into nothingness against the horizon. Within moments, the horizon lit up in a flurry of twinkling orange lights. The horizon looked like a string of Christmas lights, all blinking merrily, signaling the destruction of these mechanical beasts out there on that interminable interface between green and sky.  
            A collective cheer rose up in the throats of the soldiers on the ground. Under the commotion, the Colonel could barely hear her radio operator screaming toward her.  
            "Negative Hit! That's a Negative Hit! Both birds are down! Repeat, both birds are down!"  
            "Shit." Mitsato swore under her breath. "Negative Hit!" She screamed over the roar of the soldiers, who got real quiet, real quick. "Man those tanks! Sergeant, I want you to co-ordinate the artillery strike. This ain't a picnic ladies, let's move it out!" Soldiers scattered to their equipment. Foot soldiers prepared light antitank rockets, tanks took up a defensive formation, drawing a line between the two alien monstrosities and the Command Center.  
            Massive howitzers craned their cannon into the sky, rocket trucks trained their pipe organs toward the sundown.

--  
The two steely beasts tromped slowly toward Tokyo, whose towers and spires could barely be seen in the distance. A light plane buzzed in the distance like an ineffectual gnat. Several dozen tanks and field pieces took up formations between them and the city. All that stood between them and the city were a few plastic, cheap Japanese toys.   
            Just like clockwork, the fighter jets came, roaring over the defensive line at treetop level. Just like in a cheap videogame or action movie. Just like the Japanese, style over substance. This quirk, would be their downfall. After all, hadn't it said in Scripture "All that is Simple is Useful, all that is Complex is Worthless." These Japs, these tiny, skinny people and their shiny toys would be no match for them. If they wanted to just storm into Tokyo and take the city, they would have and spared all this theatrics.   
            But no, they wanted to show these people what could be done, how it SHOULD be done. The monsters, the demons trained their shoulder-mounted lasers on the approaching fighter planes. The computer had predicted the exact spot where the planes would be, based on their current vectors.  
            The exact second the fighters dropped their cluster bomb canisters, the machines loosed a single lightning bolt apiece that plucked the fighter planes from the sky as deftly and gently as a woman's silken hand plucking a peach from the branch. Bomblets crackled and popped and threw smoke at the beasts' feet. The planes spiraled down to the ground in a shower of flame and bits of glittering metal. One of the two machines, rifle in hand, snapped to target the spotter plane. It let a short burst chase after the light plane, which was summarily cut to pieces in the sky.  
            The second demon turned toward the first, its head, its face, despite the lack of any emotive features, seemed to scorn the first, who summarily cocked its head and shrugged. One could imagine a smirk, a "Who..? Me..?" foppish kind of smile upon its blank, black face.

Suddenly, as if by some miracle of Modern Military Tradition, rockets started falling on and around the two demons. The once pristine rolling green countryside became pockmarked with smoking craters and bomb fragments. A shame that these Japanese would be defiling such a beautiful countryside...  
            Gears cranked and servoes whined on the first demon. A square rocket pod swiveled up on its shoulder, locking into firing position. Stalin's Pipe Organ, these rocket pods were called back in the Great Patriotic War. The organ tooted and whistled, and a volley of nearly a hundred missiles made a deliberate arc toward the defensive position. Flame and smoke rose into the sky shortly before the satisfying crunch of explosives against steel could be heard. The demon shucked the rocket pod. It fell fifty feet to the ground, leaving its own tiny crater in the soggy earth.

--  
Flames and smoke curled around Mitsato, that rocket attack had taken out a full quarter of her contingent. Streams of burning phosphorus lanced out from the demons, their cannons punching holes the size of grapefruit into her tanks and artillery.  
            "I want those tanks to split into two units! First Unit! I need you here, feinting their attack! Second Unit, you're going to go around the hill to the north, I want you to try to get their flank!" Mitsato shouted through the battlefield comm. The troops around her were nervous. Hell, SHE was nervous. Last time this happened, most of Tokyo was safe, underground, safe from the Angels. Now that the city had dikes erected and most of the flood water diverged, things were starting to return to a semblance of normalcy. People had moved back into their homes, began to recollect their lives and rebuild their beloved city.

Now this... The people won't be ready for this. They had to be stopped here. The line had been drawn in the sand. These monsters, these demons will not cross.

Another fusillade of tracer fire lit up the twilight. Another howitzer and two armored cars erupted in a depleted uranium-stoked conflagration. Now, the demons were just a mile away, Mitsato could make out their features without the aid of a spotting scope. Long, slender limbs. They moved with the same effortless grace as the EVAs, as if they were constructed at the same factory. They had an odd camouflage pattern. It reminded her of the pictures of the Wermacht smocks that German soldiers wore back in the Second World War. Each were holding cannons as rifles, a pair of rocket pods sat on their backs. Well, two on one, one on the other. Every so often, one would fire their shoulder-mounted lasers, which would light up the sky red and crash like thunder, exchanging yet another tank or field piece with a smoking crater and a handful of assorted steel bits.  
            The leading demon seemed to be the one doing most of the firing, concentrating all its effort on the howitzers and ignoring the tanks, as if the newest Japanese M2022s weren't anything to sneeze at. They were more than a match for the American M19-A2 or the Russian T20, not that the Japanese would ever engage in a war against the Americans or the Russians... Again, that is to say.

When the two demons, no EVAs, now that they were close enough to see detail without squinting, Mitsato could definitely tell that they were EVAs. Even down to the fins on their shoulders, these things were almost exact copies of EVA 02. Mitsato shouted the go command into the comm, and in an instant two dozen tanks careened over the hillock to the north, guns blazing.  
            _YES!_ Mitsato thought to herself as she made a fist. _We've got 'em flanked!_

The trailing demon though, just swiveled toward the tanks, its two rocket pods snapping up into place. It launched the contents of both pods toward the tank column.  
            Mitsato's jaw dropped as the entire column met its grisly, fiery destruction. The EVA, not even skipping a step. It simply shucked the empty rocket pods as if they were an empty magazine, and continued toward the line, firing a burst of cannon fire every other step, refreshing its magazine every sixth step...

Mitsato was shouting orders through the comm. when thunder cracked and an armored car beside her erupted in a diesel-stoked conflagration. The Colonel was thrown, how far she knew not, downrange. She collided against the wreckage of a tank, her head slamming resolutely against a road wheel. Colonel Katsuragi felt blood hit her eyes, before she could move a hand up to clear them, she slipped off the conscious road and plummeted into the inky blackness of concussion-induced slumber...


End file.
